Stages of Grief
by katjen
Summary: AU, Futurefic, post S2's NP: When he crashes and burns everything gets singed...
1. prologue

Title: Stages of Grief

Author: Katjen

Rating: PG13/R (language)

Disclaimer: So not mine. If it were, S3 would be going _very_ differently…

Notes: Futurefic, AU, post S2's _Not Pictured_.

It took him a while but he did do it. He did get over her.

He went through all the textbook stages, and even while he was painfully aware of how fucking lame and unoriginal it all was, he milked the hell out of each and every one of them.

Because Logan Echolls doesn't believe in doing things half-assed.

If he's going to be mad, he's going to be furious. If he's going to be sad he's going to be decimated. As much as it makes him sound like a walking ad for anti-depressants it's a choice not a chemical imbalance. Call it his innate flair for the dramatic. Call it immaturity or just an inexplicable need to be the asshole in every situation. He probably wouldn't disagree with you on any particular point.

All or nothing.

Hate or love but never indifference, never ambivalence. When he loves, he loves hard and when he hates he's got battery acid in his veins. Extremes are all he knows.

When he crashes and burns everything gets singed.


	2. july, 2006

_July, 2006_

Between bong hits and jello shooters, a merry-go-round of skanks, Dick offers this advice: Dude. Stop being such a pussy. She's gone. Deal with it. Get some somewhere else.

"Of all the shit that's happened to you…" He shakes his head, disgusted, pops a pill that may or may not be a breath mint. "I thought you were done with this crap…"

Dick checks himself out in the hallway mirror. He adjusts the collar of his jacket with pushed out lips doing his best _Blue Steel_ while Logan lazily pitches empty Fat Tire bottles into the trashcan from the couch missing more often than not but not really caring all that much because he's drunk and feeling dark and likes the sound the glass makes either way.

"I thought you were "over it" or whatever."

"Are you?" Logan mutters, squints at the label on the last bottle, the hairline crack that disappears behind it and Dick pauses from his grooming, his mouth falling into a hard thin line at the question.

He's being a shit.

He knows it. He doesn't care.

He picks at the label, peels it away.

Dick gives his collar a final sharp tug in a non-answer and Logan fits his hand over the jagged line in the glass disappointed not to be drawing blood when he feels the edge, because it's right _there_ and it's _sharp_.

"I'm out for the night," Dick says and he rummages in his pockets, glaring at an area somewhere over Logan's left shoulder, because he can't look him in the eye.

He flicks a condom at him hard as he passes, "Do a brunette or a redhead sometime. Stop torturing yourself, man," and slams the door behind him when he leaves making it clear that Logan has effectively pissed him off.

Which, fair enough.

There's only one thing Dick asks of him and that's to leave him the fuck alone when it comes to that night.

Logan can relive, rehash, and replay all he wants, but Dick does. Not. Want. To. Talk. About. It.

What he wants is for Logan to pretend that fucking a girl who, for once, bears absolutely no resemblance in any shape or form to Veronica Mars will get her out of his system, will get _all_ of it out of his system, like sex is the answer to everything, just like booze is the answer, just like drugs, when all it is is the wrapping on something really ugly and Logan can't _not_ look at ugly close up. He has to tear the paper off and face the fucking pears even if it kills him. He has to search for the bloodstains beneath the Porsche, the Mercedes whenever he looks down from his balcony onto the parking lot. Never mind that it happened on the other side of the hotel, he's still gonna _look_. He's still gonna drive to Veronica's empty apartment and remember being inside it with her, remember being in her bed and holding her while she cried, while she slept, and promising himself that he was going to take care of her, he was going to be strong for her. And then he'd make himself remember her not being there, her not leaving him a note, her not leaving him anything like it meant nothing what they did, what they said to each other.

Logan presses ugly into himself like invisible tattoos all, _that which doesn't kill me only makes me… _while Dick prefers to shove it into safes and lockboxes and forget the combinations, lose the keys.

Dick deals by not dealing at all, and that includes pretending that Beaver's been shipped off to boarding school or, fuck, even _jail_ (he's not _dead_, he's not just _gone_). Logan's father is on location for some new multimillion-dollar seen-it-a-billion-times-before action flick (he did not have his brains blown out all over some flat screen on the 27th floor). Mr. Mars is on a case somewhere far, far away in like, _Bumblefuck_, USA (his ashes did not rain down over Neptune while Veronica broke into a thousand little pieces right before his eyes). And Veronica… maybe she went with Keith on the case.

Or maybe she went to Stanford after all.

He leans his head back against the arch of the couch feeling empty like one of his broken bottles, jagged.

He hates that he's doing this again.

He's gone through the fucking stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance…

He's pretty sure he's not supposed to be going through them on a _loop_.

He really thought he was done with it.

It's been two months, and here he is. Picking at the scabs.

But maybe that's not so surprising. Maybe it was inevitable that he'd be here again, Howard Hughes-ing it to the best of his ability short of saving his pee in the bottles littering the floor. He's rich and unemployed and not in school anymore. Really, there's not much else to do but sit around and drink and think about the sorry state of his life and kind of marvel at how spectacularly sucky it has turned out to be.

That and there was a dog on the beach this afternoon that looked exactly like Backup.

He followed the fucking thing all over the place until it loped up to it's owner who was definitely _not_ Veronica and then he got drunk again for the first time in weeks.

It set him off, that damn dog, it made him come home with a case of expensive beer and silently begin to put them away one after the other after the other while Dick did his _business as usual_ thing and got ready for another night out leaving Logan on the couch in a stupor wondering how the fuck he does it.

Dick's always been emotional Teflon, he's told him before that he actively _tries_ to be, it's only lately that he can see the effort it takes and instead of being understanding about it he's feeling the need to be confrontational. Because yeah, his father was murdered, and truthfully he's a little disturbed by how upset he's _not_, apart from the fact that he is alone now, completely and utterly, but the twisted up sadness he feels over it has more to do with Veronica than anything else. He lost a girl he never had, but Dick lost his _brother_. And while Logan can't think of Cassidy anymore without thinking about what he did to Veronica (and yes those kids on the bus, but really, he didn't _know_ any of them so the grief he felt at the time was admittedly a little forced. Plus he'd been too concerned with trying to keep his ass out of jail for the better part of the year.), which fills him with a white hot rage he knows he inherited, it was still _Cassidy_. Scrawny Cassidy Casablancas who Logan had known for years, who had been a part of their inner circle. Cassidy, his _friend_, who shot a gun at him. Raped… Veronica. Murdered her father and a busload of innocent students, a teacher, someone's father, the fucking pedophilic Woody Goodman who, personally, he would much rather have seen in jail getting regularly assraped by any number of burly, scarier-than-shit horny ex-cons.

He wants to hate Cassidy, wants to be glad he's gone, but when he's not torturing himself over Veronica he's thinking about the look on his face when he asked him to give him a reason not to jump and he couldn't do it.

He hasn't told Dick about that.

He told him Cassidy didn't say a word, that he just jumped and that was it. Dick had nodded, just once, and then went on pretending that the funeral he was getting dressed for was just another party, albeit one with a stricter dress code. When he came back he pulled out the X-Box and played for four hours while Logan sat there waiting for him to talk about it, about _anything_.

"_Dick, Cassidy-"_

"_Is an asshole. You playing_ _or not?"_

And that was that.

Dick moved in a week later saying that since his dad was still "in hiding", his mom was going back to Europe with her new husband (whom Dick didn't know but could tell was a tool) and Kendall was MIA probably looking for her next sugar daddy, he had the house all to himself and that, surprisingly, it sucked. Mostly due to the lack room and maid service.

So Logan invited him to stay, invited him into his den of depression. Hell, he _welcomed_ the company, but Dick stubbornly insisted on pretending that all that had happened in the last few weeks was that Logan had been dumped and he was just talking it badly.

Because that's what Logan does.

He takes things badly.

Exhibit A: Lilly's death.

He used to sneak into the Kane's backyard in the middle of the night to sit by the pool in the very spot she died. A spot where he'd had sex with her, where he'd told her he loved her while the sun shone over her shoulder and she smiled and told him how whipped he was.

He'd sit there in the dark and he'd drink and he'd think about her, about that last fight and how he doesn't remember the last thing he ever said to her, but he's 90 sure it wasn't very nice.

And then he'd go out, he'd fuck girls.

Blondes.

He'd call them his girlfriends like that meant anything other than a warm body who's name he actually bothered to remember.

Lilly would have hated Caitlyn.

He thinks it's why he said _yes_ when she slithered up to him, when she tossed her hair and touched his chest, and _I want you to fuck me Logan Echolls._

He thinks he wanted to punish Lilly.

He wanted to hurt her for leaving him and not giving him a chance to tell her one last time that as much as he hated her sometimes he loved her. He loved her so fucking much it scared him.

He'd sit there in the dark and think he had been right to be scared, because life without Lilly Kane, life without the one person who knew him and how ugly he really was inside but wanted him anyway was terrifying.

Exhibit B: His mother's suicide.

A year after Lilly's murder he spent countless nights on the Coronado Bridge toasting Lynn with a flask, his legs dangling over the side, swinging through the blackness. He'd heard somewhere that a fall like that could break every bone in your body the second you hit, the water hard as concrete and he'd swing his legs a little harder, feeling the momentum jerking him closer to the edge, wanting to punish himself.

For not being enough to stick around for.

For not protecting her, for not being a better son…

For being just like _him_ in too many ways.

Which brings us to Exhibit C.

Every once in a while he finds himself standing outside room 27A thinking about buying it for a night just so he can sit there in the last place Aaron ever was and show whatever is left of him there that he survived, that he's fine. Better than he's ever been.

But he's not. He's not _fine_. He's not anywhere in the _vicinity_ of being fine.

He's on the bridge swinging his legs harder, harder. He's drinking too much, sleeping with too many girls.

And Veronica's not here to pull him back from the ledge this time, to stop the momentum, and he tells himself he doesn't care that she's not but he's gotten really good at lying to himself and he doesn't really know anything anymore.

So he backslides, he buys another case of beer and he works on Exhibit D, adds it to the list of heartaches and tells himself that even though Lilly's murder, his mother's death, still stings, he's learned to live with it. He can learn to live with this too, but not yet, not yet. He still sees her too clearly. He still remembers everything way too clearly.


	3. september, october, 2006

_September, 2006_

Dick has joined a fraternity.

Logan didn't even know he was going to college.

He asks him if that means he's moving out and Dick says, Dude. Campus housing sucks and at the frat there's like, _barracks_ and shit.

"Dick shares a bedroom with _no_ man." He sits down beside Logan, picks up a controller and joins the game not looking at him when he says, "You should think about going too. Late admission or whatever."

"And _why_ pray fucking tell should I?" He nails an enemy soldier, his blood splattering all over the wall of some decrepit building that looks three seconds from toppling and crushing him good.

"'Cause you're like… _devolving_. I'm gonna come back from _Intro to Underwater Basket Weaving_ one day and you'll've completely transformed into a troglodyte or something. And Dude. No one likes a troglodyte for a roommate."

"That's a big word, Dick." Logan beats at his controller, more blood on the walls and Dick agrees.

"Fucking _college_, man."

He's asleep on the couch when Dick comes stumbling in drunk off his ass.

He slams the door, trips over his own feet and lands on the floor in a crumpled heap laughing like sobbing and Logan flicks on the light with a groggy _what the hell?_

Dick looks up at him red faced and kind of crying and Logan crouches down, puts a hand on his arm that Dick roughly shakes off, slurring "don' fuckin' touch me."

He pulls himself up onto the couch, cracks one of Logan's (warm) beers and sucks it down.

"Got more?" he belches when he finishes and Logan gets to his feet, runs a hand through his hair with a "yeah, man."

And then they sit there together in the dark for two days drinking and smoking up and playing _Halo_ and Logan doesn't ask what happened, doesn't ask what this is about, and then somewhere around four a.m. one morning Dick says, "I made Ghost World cry," and then he pauses the game, tosses his controller aside and goes to his room, shutting the door behind him.

_October, 2006_

Dick goes to just enough of his classes to stave off expulsion although he's drunk for half of them and high for the rest. Logan asks why he bothers when he could be surfing all day and feeling like shit _without_ the added bonus of homework, and Dick says college makes him feel like he has some semblance of a life even though he can't remember most of it.

"'_sides man my trust fund isn't as big as yours. Dick's gonna need a job someday."_

"_Doing what?"_

_Half shrug._

"_Hopefully as little as possible."_

Logan has no intention of enrolling at Hearst himself, but he hangs with the college crowd because self-imposed isolation can get fucking boring. He goes to their parties. He goes to their bars with Dick and his "brothers", and when Dick calls them that there's a shard of irony in his voice.

Dick's pretty much abandoned the_ It Never Happened Dude You're Fucking High_ mode of dealing with Beaver's death and moved onto something Cassidy would have appreciated even less.

_"The dead little brother thing? Totally awesome chick bait – it's all about the sympathy. A little screw so Dick's not blue…"_

Logan still doesn't know what happened that night that cracked the_ I'm Fine Everything's Fine Stop Fucking Insinuating That It's Not _mask Dick's been struggling to uphold all summer and he hasn't asked because Dick's a lot quicker to use his fists these days and Logan doesn't need an excuse to hit back because fighting is his new hobby and he's _really_ fucking good at it.

Most of the time his chosen opponent is a hell of a lot bigger than he is. It's kind of the point.

He picks fights that he has a good chance of losing, he pushes his luck, shoves it, bitch-slaps it upside the head.

Last week he decked a guy that looked like he brushed his teeth with steroids and probably would have been killed if Wallace hadn't stepped in and hauled his ass out of there while Dick's "brothers" started wailing on everything in sight. It wasn't loyalty or anything. Steroid guy called Chip Diller a homo and unsurprisingly, them's _fightin'_ words.

Wallace took him out into the alley and didn't flinch when Logan shoved him off, but held up his hands in a _whoa man_ that made him feel kind of bad.

Instead of saying, _thanks_ – because he wouldn't mean it, or _what's up?_ – because he didn't really care, he asked Wallace point blank, _"Have you heard from her?"_

And after a minute of staring at him like he was fucking measuring him up or something, trying to gauge what kind of answer he should give him that wouldn't push him over the edge he was so obviously teetering on, he shook his head slowly, shoving his hands deep into his pockets.

"_Are you lying?"_ Logan had snarled and Wallace glared at him, snapped, _"No, man, I'm not __**lying**__. I haven't heard from her since graduation. She just… disappeared."_

He didn't try to get anything else out of him after that, didn't threaten him or anything because if Wallace _was_ lying, there was a 99 chance she had asked him to and that… he didn't want to think about that.

So he limped to his car, he went home.

The girl he'd been doing at the time… Shauna? Sherri? Sh-something. She was waiting for him outside his door for a date he'd forgotten they'd made.

He clumsily swept his keycard through the lock without apologizing for being late and bloody and stumbled inside not bothering to turn on the light. He collapsed onto the couch as she stared down at him, looked at him like he was a psycho and he said to her _"You have no fucking idea,"_ as he spat his blood onto the floor.

She broke up with him that night.

He doesn't remember particularly caring.

She slammed the door to his room leaving him in a pile of Neosporin packets and bandages, yelling at him that he should be _ashamed of himself_ and his _immature alpha male behavior_, and he didn't argue, didn't apologize, didn't _anything_ but salute the door and then flop back onto the bed with a wince as he jarred his bruised ribs.

He'd stared up at the ceiling, too aware of his breathing, too aware of how much everything hurt, thinking as he turned his head to meet his reflection in the mirror across the way, _This is who you are now. _

This guy with bloody knuckles and a bruised face, a curled lip and narrowed eyes... _This is you._

This split skin... _It's your cancer._

This aggression... _It's your goddamn birthright. _

He's been branded, silver-white scars crisscrossed like a road map of his fucked up childhood on his back declaring it, making it true.

Fucking Aaron made sure Logan would never be able to forget where he came from, and Fucking Lynn taught him how to live with it.

Love someone who doesn't love you and then distract yourself from that with vodka and pills. And if that doesn't work as well as you want it to, get that love _beaten_ out of you by strangers in bars, in parking lots and then fight back harder hoping they'll up the ante, they'll call you on your suicidal tendencies.

Logan hates to admit it but it's become blindingly obvious over these last few months that he is his parents' son.

He _sees_ them in himself now and it scares the shit out of him but he can't stop. He gets in one last punch, the one that breaks the bone, he swallows one more pill, the one that gets his stomach pumped and the door slams behind her the door slams behind her the door slams behind her.

He's checking out of the hospital when he sees her and before he can even think about pretending he didn't notice and turning the other way they make eye contact.

_Fuck._

He really doesn't want to deal with this right now.

He really doesn't want to engage in a stilted conversation right now where they will both be searching desperately for something to say to each other that won't bring up any bad memories. It's not something he wants to expel any energy towards when it's already costing him far too much to remain upright. _Especially_ since it's a fucking impossible feat. The only connection he and Mac _have_ to each other _is_ Cassidy.

And Veronica.

_Veronica..._

Mac's friendship with her is why, ultimately, he bites the bullet of insured awkwardness and finds himself walking towards her instead of giving her a dismissive half-wave and continuing on his way. Why he finds himself sitting down beside her in one of those hard plastic chairs that creaks and shakes and threatens to buckle as he prepares to steamroll through the pleasantries.

He doesn't say anything for a moment though as he tries to decide how to interrogate her without being too much of an asshole, and she looks at him all pale and wide-eyed and stammers, "My dad… had a heart attack…"

She says it haltingly, like she's trying the words out, trying to see if she believes them and he blinks at her, surprised, swallowing hard before saying, "…That sucks."

"Yeah…" She stares down at her shoes, the untied laces hot pink slashes against the black canvas, the scuffed floor, and he looks at them too not knowing what else to say.

There's a skull and cross bones stenciled on the sides and really, he fucking _hates_ hospitals.

He tries, "Is he going to be okay?" and she nods.

"Yeah, I think so… My mom is talking to the doctor right now in there." She tilts her head at the closed door next to her seat. "I told them I had to go to the bathroom... I just… I needed to get out of there for a minute."

He stares at her hands curled into fists, clutching the cuffs of her jacket sleeves. Her knuckles are white and he looks up at her feeling her eyes on his face.

"You kind of look like crap, Logan."

"I kind of feel like crap, Mac."

He stares at her shoes again, the skull, the bones. He really wants her to take them off. Tempting fate doesn't seem like the best idea in this place.

"I'm sorry about your dad…"

She says it awkwardly, like she's not sure she should. Like she's not sure she means it and that makes him smile a little but when he lifts his head again and meets her eyes he sees that she does and he stares back at her expressionless and tight-mouthed and _areyoufuckingkiddingme?_ until she shifts uncomfortably in her seat and averts her eyes, muttering under her breath, "or… you know, _not_."

His jaw tightens, his eyes burn. He doesn't need to be thinking about his fucking father. Not now.

He _needs_ to ask her about Veronica, if she's heard from her, if she's okay. Mac is the only person besides Wallace and Cliff that she might have contacted. He'd already harassed Cliff into admitting that he sent a check for the sale of the contents of the Mars apartment to a P.O. box and that that was the extent of his involvement in her disappearance, and he's decided that Wallace was telling the truth when he said he didn't know anything because the _Veronica-told-him-to-lie_ alternative makes him nauseous. And Angry. Really really Angry, and he has no need to be going there again.

He takes a deep breath, reminding himself that he's done with his second fucking loop of _stages_ and that he's ready to _Accept_ for real this time whatever answer he's going to get: "She's fine, she's dealing, she's glad she skipped town." _I accept that._ "She's miserable and alone." _I am at peace with that. _

"Dick Casablancas," Mac says and he blinks.

"What about him?"

"Is he always such a…" she shakes her head, flips her hands.

"Dick?"

She nods, tugs on the cuffs of her jacket again, harder.

"In varying degrees."

She scowls suddenly, "Is he even _sad_?" and Logan thinks of him passed out on the couch, the table littered with more bottles, the ashtray overflowing with the carcasses of joints smoked down to tiny black nubs that burned his fingers before he'd grind them out.

"Yeah, he is."

"Are you?"

He turns his head to stare off down the hall at the doors he'd just come through.

And he says "No." He says "I'm over it." And there's _Denial_ rearing its ass-ugly head again.

"Good for you." She spits it out with a curl to her lip and he can't ask her about Veronica now. He's missed his chance. Ordinarily he'd push until he got what he wanted but… she doesn't look like she could handle it right now and as fucking selfish as he is most of the time, he's not a complete bastard. So he decides to leave her alone.

He gets to his feet, pauses to look down at her and says, honestly, "I'm glad your dad's going to be okay."

She bites her lip and nods and he feels a little bit forgiven, but he's still not going to ask, not tonight.

"Dude!"

He turns his head to see Dick sauntering down the hallway towards them. He checks out a candy striper as he passes, looking more sober than he has in… Logan doesn't know how long. He kind of can't remember the last time he even saw him. It might have been yesterday. Or last week. He's been having a hard time differentiating Mondays from Tuesdays, Wednesdays from Thursdays. Every day's the weekend when you're rich and idle.

Dick doesn't look at Mac when he reaches them, he doesn't acknowledge her at all, just shoves his hands into his pockets and says, "The concierge or whatever told me you were here. What happened man?"

"Nothing. It was an accident."

Dick looks at him like he's not sure he believes it and he wants to remind him that he's already done _Depression_. Twice. He's on _Acceptance_ now, damnit.

"You chased sleeping pills with half a bottle of JD, Dude."

"I couldn't sleep."

Dick glares at him, and really, Sober!Dick is a pain in the ass.

"Whatever. Just… don't fuckin' die man, okay? That would fucking suck-"

"Cindy, honey?"

The door next to their chairs opens and a blonde woman steps out. She holds her arms out to Mac who stands but makes no move to step into them and the woman says, "It's okay, honey, it's okay," and she comes to her, wraps her arms around her and Logan watches Mac's rise stiffly to curl awkwardly around the woman who says, "He's awake sweetie, he wants to see you…"

Mac's voice is muffled against the woman's shoulder and he can't hear what she says but it sounds like she's crying and he turns away as they go into the room, as they shut the door behind them.

"What's up with that?" Dick asks, jerking his chin after them.

"Her dad's in there. Heart attack."

Dick pauses for a moment staring at the door and then turns on his heel muttering under his breath, "Chick's bad luck."


End file.
